About Blank Index
Blank Index publishes one thing: a five-step reading course for people in Australia who are considering a free-to-play PC game and do not know where to start. This page explains who publishes it, how it was built, and how it is paid for.
Who publishes this site
Blank Index is published by I&M ALEX s.r.o., a company registered in the Czech Republic.
I&M ALEX s.r.o.Víta Nejedlého 869/7, Žižkov, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
Company registration: 08037892
Email: info@blankindex.online
The course is written by the I&M ALEX s.r.o. editorial team. There are no named authors, no guest contributors and no instructors, because the publisher takes responsibility for the whole text rather than attributing parts of it to individuals. You will not find biographies or photographs here; there is nothing to see and inventing them would be worse than their absence.
What the course is, and what it is not
It is reading material with checklists. You read it, you do the things on the lists, and that is the whole arrangement. There is nothing to sign up for, no record of who has read what, and no certificate, badge or completion state. It is not accredited training, it is not professional advice, and it is not a substitute for reading the terms of whatever you eventually install.
It is also not a review site. The course does not rank games, score them or tell you which one to choose. Its subject is the category — what a free-to-play PC game is, what it asks of you, and how to assess one — and it uses a single example throughout so that the method has something to attach to.
How the course was structured
The five steps follow the order in which the decisions actually arrive for someone starting from nothing: understand the business model, check the hardware, handle the account, install and test, then decide about money. That order is the main editorial decision in the whole site, and it was chosen because the expensive mistakes tend to come from doing these things in a different order — creating accounts before checking hardware, or spending before understanding what the in-game currency is worth.
Each step was written to be readable on its own but to assume the vocabulary of the steps before it. Terms are defined the first time they appear, and Step 1 ends with a glossary strip precisely so that later steps do not have to keep stopping. Each step closes with a checklist of things to do rather than things to remember, and all the checklists are gathered on one printable page.
What sources each step relies on
| Step | What it relies on |
|---|---|
| Step 1 — the free-to-play model | General description of business models in the category, written as guidance rather than as measurement. Consumer rights statements link to the ACCC. |
| Step 2 — hardware | General, durable facts about operating systems, processors, memory, graphics and storage. Specific requirement figures are not reproduced; readers are sent to the vendor's own current page. |
| Step 3 — accounts and terms | The structure of sign-up forms and privacy notices in general. Australian privacy rights link to the Australian Privacy Principles; account security guidance links to the Australian Cyber Security Centre; impersonation and scam material links to Scamwatch. |
| Step 4 — installing | A general order of operations applying to any large PC game. No performance figures for any title are given, because none can be given honestly without testing we have not done. |
| Step 5 — spending and classification | Arithmetic the reader does for themselves against prices on screen. Classification links to the Australian Classification Board; family guidance links to the eSafety Commissioner; consumer guarantees link to the ACCC. |
Facts about the example game, Crossout, come from one place only: what the vendor states about it. The vendor describes it as a free-to-play MMO vehicle-combat game set in post-apocalyptic realities, built around player-constructed vehicles, available for Windows and Linux and not for macOS, with registration completed by confirming an email address and signing in. Where the course needs a fact the vendor does not state — pricing, performance, classification, whether randomised containers are sold — it says the vendor does not state it and sends you to look. That rule is applied strictly, because the publisher is not a neutral party about this game.
The commercial relationship, stated plainly
Links on this site to Crossout are paid affiliate links. If you create and confirm an account after following one, I&M ALEX s.r.o. is paid a commission by the affiliate network that operates the link. You pay nothing; the commission comes from the advertiser's marketing budget, not from you, and the game's own terms are unchanged by the route you arrived through.
Crossout is the only product in the course with which the publisher has any commercial relationship. It was chosen as the example because that relationship exists — that is the honest answer, and any other answer would be a decoration. What the commission does not decide is what the five steps say: the hardware method in Step 2, the privacy reading in Step 3 and the spending limits in Step 5 are the same advice we would give about any game in the category, and Step 5 in particular is written to reduce spending rather than encourage it.
The course is also written so that it works with every affiliate link removed. If you ignore them entirely, the five steps and six checklists are unchanged and complete. The full explanation is on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
How often it is reviewed
The whole course is reread at least twice a year, and the review date is printed in the footer of every page. A review checks three things: that links to Australian government bodies still resolve to the right place, that statements about the example game still match what the vendor says, and that nothing has become dated in the hardware guidance. If a statement can no longer be supported, it is removed rather than softened.
Legal pages carry their own effective date at the top, which is updated whenever their content changes.
What this site collects about you
Nothing beyond the ordinary server logs any website produces. There are no forms, no accounts, no analytics, no advertising tags, no cookies and no web storage; the checklists do not remember ticks because nothing here remembers anything. The site makes no requests to any other server, which is why it has no web fonts and no embedded media. The Privacy Policy sets this out in full and the Cookie Policy lists each technology that was checked and not used.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, write to info@blankindex.online and say which page and which sentence. Corrections of fact are made without argument and the review date is updated. Disagreements about emphasis are read and considered, which is a weaker promise but an honest one.